In 2021, independent curator Oхana Polyakova invited me, among others, to an exchange program jointly developed by self-organizations Mint (Stockholm) and After_red (Moscow). For several months, a group of Swedish and Russian artists, researchers and curators met in the format of webinars, talking about their practice, and this June we met in person in Stockholm. The weeklong trip, supported by he Cultural Department of the Embassy of Sweden in Russia, had an extremely intensive program based on the interests of the participants: meetings with representatives of grant foundations, tours to museums and galleries, studio visits and, finally, a seminar “On distance and proximity: artistic practice under political constraints”.
